Women@CS

Our mission is to create, encourage, and support women's academic, social and professional opportunities in computer science and to promote the breadth of the field and its diverse community. In general, the committee strives to promote a healthy and supportive community atmosphere for everyone within the School of Computer Science. Making a difference and solving problems serve as the basic motivating purposes of the organization. It is intended as a resource and link to other CS committees providing input on any matter relating its mission (for example: undergraduate curriculum, the climate for graduate students, recruitement etc).

We work closely with

• McWics (https://www.mcwics.com/)
• Girls Who Code
• McGill Computer Science Graduate Society
• McGill Computer Science Undergraduate Society

Contact

Prof. Brigitte Pientka
McConnell Eng. 107N
brigitte.pientka@mcgill.ca

Members

Women@CS Community consists of women faculty, women graduate and undergraduate students within the School of Computer Science. It brings together members of different student organizations that share a similar goal and mission and works closely with these different student organizations.

Faculty

Bettina Kemme joined McGill in 2000 after completing her Bachelor/M.Sc. at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, and her Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. During her studies, she spent a year at the University of Seville, Spain, and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her general research interests lie in the design and development of distributed information systems with a special emphasis on data consistency. Some of her recent research projects look at adaptability issues in multi-tier architectures. The idea is to replicate the various components in such an architecture to achieve fault-tolerance and scalability. If one replica fails, others can take over the load, load is distributed among the replicas and by adding new replicas the system can handle more load. However, coordinating the replicas of one tier, and coordinating the different tiers in such an environment requires sophisticated replica control mechanisms. Bettina Kemme is also interested in XML data management, in particular, concurrency control issues, and in data management support for massively multiplayer games.

Brigitte Pientka joined the School of Computer Science in 2003 after completing her PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to her studies at Carnegie Mellon, she has studied and worked at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany), University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and Cornell University (USA). Her research area is verification and foundations of programming languages. Her principal research interest lies in developing a theoretical and practical foundation for building and reasoning about reliable software. In particular, she is leading the development of Beluga (http://complogic.cs.mcgill.ca/beluga/). To achieve this goal, she combines theoretical research in programming languages and verification with system building and real-world experiments. In particular, she applies techniques from logic, type theory, and automated deduction to find rigorous solutions to problems exposed in practice. Prof. Pientka has an active lab and is usually teaching COMP302 and encourages undergraduate students to participate in her research group via COMP396 and COMP 400 projects. Brigitte Pientka has been one of the founding members of Women@SCS at Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently the chair of Women@CS at McGill University.

Joelle Pineau has been an Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science since 2004.. She has a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.Sc. in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo. Her research is motivated by the desire to build robust intelligent autonomous systems. She is actively involved in finding new algorithmic solutions for problems of decision-making under uncertainty, and is interested in implementing these algorithms in the context of real-world robotic and medical systems.

Doina Precup joined the School of Computer Science in 2000, after completing her undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the Technical University Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and her MS and PhD degrees at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her main research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Doina is especially interested in finding computational methods by which an agent can learn from interaction with an environment, rather than by being told what it should do. Hence, most of her research is in the field of reinforcement learning.

Undergraduate Representative

Irene Woo started her undergraduate degree in Math and Computer Science in 2015. She is from Paris and has been living in New York for the past five years. Irene graduated from high school with the French Baccalaureate with the International Option. She is the VP Science of the Computer Science Undergraduate Society and is the undergraduate representative of Women@SOCS. In addition, she is a member of a Lean In circle. In her free time, she volunteers for several organizations like McGill's Chapter of the Canadian Red Cross. She also enjoys making short films.

MSc Representative

Senjuti Kundu is a Masters student in Computer Science at McGill University. She earned her Bachelors degree in Information Technology at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in 2015. She is interested in Natural Language Processing and API Documentation. Currently she is a research assistant at the Software and Programming Languages Lab.

PhD Representative

Florence Clerc has started her PhD at McGill in 2015 under the supervision of Prakash Panangaden. She has a master in pure mathematics and a master in theoretical computer science from University Paris Diderot. She has also studied applied mathematics at Ecole Centrale Paris (a French Grande Ecole). She is particularly interested in category theory, logic and markov processes.

Milena Scaccia (http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~mscacc) is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at McGill and also holds B.Sc. (Honours) and M.Sc. degrees from McGill. Her current area of research focuses on the perceptual evaluation of computer graphics shading techniques in scenes containing 3D clutter. During her studies she has also taught freshman/undergraduate level CS courses and has dedicated her summers to the organization of the School's Computer Science summer camp. These activities have enriched future students' education in CS and also inspired more women to pursue CS studies. Milena is pleased to be a member of the Women@CS committee where she continues to encourage female participation in Computer Science.